HAINESPORT, New Jersey – The Hainesport Township School District needs to cut expenses, and officials think outsourcing the school’s custodial, maintenance and groundskeeping jobs to private, for-profit companies might be one way of doing so.

This has caused Hainesport’s school employee unions to launch a scare campaign against the concept of privatization. At a recent school board meeting, a handful of union supporters warned against letting “strangers” into the schools, and hinted that student safety might be compromised.

It’s a scenario being played out in communities all across the nation. Cash-strapped school boards are turning to private companies for huge savings, while school employee unions are fighting for their positions by resorting to every cheap scare tactic listed in the National Education Association’s “ Beat Privatization: A Step-by-Step Crisis Action Plan.”

The National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union, has been hemorrhaging members for several years, and is desperate to retain as many dues-payers as possible – even if it means overwhelming thin school budgets with unnecessary labor costs.

When a school board tries to save money by hiring a few non-union workers to fill support positions, the unions react by trying to demonize private sector employees, as if they are not dedicated or moral enough to work in public schools.

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Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is the most liberal member of the United States Senate, according to NationalJournal vote rankings. Senator Brown supports the freaks of Occupy Wall Street, opposes free trade, and was the deciding vote for Obamacare.

That vote could be… problematic, as explained by likely 2012 challenger Josh Mandel:

We must not overlook the truly significant blow that Ohioans dealt Obamacare last week, with a mix of 2.2 million Democrats, Republicans and Independents rejecting this intrusion on individual liberty and family control over health care decisions.

Indeed, you would be pressed to find a statist boondoggle Sherrod Brown doesn’t love. Check out this rant from a Q&A session Sherrod held this spring with Ohio’s largest government union:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=LOxe7Hs5Q5s

According to Senator Brown, privatization is always driven by “greed” and always makes “the services get worse.” Hearty red meat for a government union crowd, but keep in mind this was an unscripted response. Bigger government, higher taxes, and demonizing The Rich are the only things Sherrod knows.

Sadly for Sherrod, every county in Ohio voted to amend the state constitution against Obamacare’s individual mandate – even after a $30 million Progressive smear campaign against union reform. With huge turnout for an off-year election, the citizen-driven Health Care Freedom Amendment passed by a wider margin than the union issue failed! Brown claims the amendment was “confusing,” which would be a great explanation for the opposite result.

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Later this month, Pennsylvania lawmakers will return to debate privatizing state-owned liquor stores.  Yes, for our friends in California, Texas, Florida or any of the 30 states that have never seen a government-run liquor store, Pennsylvania state government remains in the business of selling alcohol to its residents.  Pennsylvania is one of only two states in the nation (Utah being the other) with complete government control of wine and spirits sales.

The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board’s (PLCB) recent failures help demonstrate why government in the booze business is a lose business.  In a notable example, the agency tried its own form of Perestroika, allowing wine to be sold in grocery stores through wine kiosks: Rube Goldberg-like contraptions in which consumers would blow into a breathalyzer and show ID through video to a state worker sitting in the PLCB’s central office.

The program was a catastrophe from the start, as many – including the PLCB’s own advisory committee – predicted.  The machines broke down during the Christmas rush and the kiosk contractor now reportedly owes the state $1 million (a cynic might point out the contractor has deep ties to former Governor Ed Rendell).  Wegman’s, one of the state’s largest grocery chains, dropped all wine kiosks in June.  This week, state Auditor General Jack Wagner released a report declaring the program a failure.  The Philadelphia Inquirer said of the fiasco, “Rarely before has any government agency so succinctly, thoroughly, and convincingly made the case for its own elimination.”

Although Pennsylvania and Utah are the only states with a complete government monopoly on liquor sales, other states continue to fight for libation liberation.  State liquor store privatization remains a hot issue in Washington and Virginia where, although private stores are permitted to carry wine, government control still remains.

The latest effort to get government out of the booze business is spearheaded by House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R-Pittsburgh).  His proposal calls for auctioning off 1,250 liquor store licenses (up from Pennsylvania’s current 650 stores), divesting the wholesale operations, and selling off the state store inventory.  With Republicans controlling both the state House and Senate, and Gov. Tom Corbett supporting privatization, momentum is building to enact liquor liberty this year.

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Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty turned out a blockbuster economic-growth plan this past week, including deep cuts in taxes, spending, and regulations. It’s really the first Reaganesque supply-side growth plan from any of the GOP presidential contenders. And he caps it all off with a defense of optimism as he charges ahead with a national economic growth goal of 5 percent.

That’s right: 5 percent.

Pawlenty calls this target aspirational. Okay, fine. But deeper down, he’s basically saying no to the declinists and pessimists who seem to populate the economic landscape these days. Big government doesn’t work. Let’s try something different.

Ronald Reagan always believed that America is exceptional. By removing obstacles to growth, the Gipper held that economic policies could unleash a massive outpouring of risk-taking, creativity, and entrepreneurship. He was right, and his policies launched a two-decade-long boom.

Actually, the first couple years of the Reagan recovery came in at over 7 percent. And as Pawlenty noted in his speech at the University of Chicago this week, between 1983 and 1987, the Reagan recovery grew at 4.9 percent annually. I note that Pres. John F. Kennedy also had a 5 percent growth target, a response to Ike’s three recessions.

So while those on the left criticize Pawlenty, and while even some conservatives scoff at his growth target, history says we’ve been there before.

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There are two crises facing Social Security. First the program has a gigantic unfunded liability, largely caused by demographics. Second, the program is a very bad deal for younger workers, making them pay record amounts of tax in exchange for comparatively meager benefits. This video explains how personal accounts can solve both problems, and also notes that nations as varied as Australia, Chile, Sweden, and Hong Kong have implemented this pro-growth reform.

Social Security reform received a good bit of attention in the past two decades. President Clinton openly flirted with the idea, and President Bush explicitly endorsed the concept. But it has faded from the public square in recent years. But this may be about to change. Personal accounts are part of Congressman Paul Ryan’s Roadmap proposal, and recent polls show continued strong support for letting younger workers shift some of their payroll taxes to individual accounts.

Equally important, the American people understand that Social Security’s finances are unsustainable. They may not know specific numbers, but they know politicians have created a house of cards, which is why jokes about the system are so easily understandable.

President Obama thinks the answer is higher taxes, which is hardly a surprise. But making people pay more is hardly an attractive option, unless you’re the type of person who thinks it’s okay to give people a hamburger and charge them for a steak.

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From the Boston Globe:

Fannie and Freddie were once the most powerful forces in the US housing industry. They pumped liquidity into the sector by buying up mortgages written by banks and mortgage companies. That kept the cost of capital low and increased the volume of mortgages. Government backing allowed the two to borrow money at lower rates than anyone else in the housing financing market.

While Fannie and Freddie operated under some form of congressional oversight, they ultimately answered to their stockholders. Their business was making money. They joined Wall Street firms in making record profits — and hauling in record bonuses — by buying, securitizing, and reselling subprime mortgages that never should have been written in the first place.

The housing market’s collapse sowed destruction and put the nation’s biggest banks on a government lifeline. No lifeline has been bigger than the rope the feds threw Fannie and Freddie, though. In September 2008, the two firms received a bottomless line of credit. So far, their tab stands around $148 billion — more than AIG, the company that insured all of Wall Street’s worst housing bets, is in hock for.

In January, the Congressional Budget Office said the total cost to taxpayers could reach $373 billion.

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With no shock and awe and little pomp and circumstance, China has declared war on the world.  Having watched the Gulf Wars on CNN, Americans are accustomed to wars fought with jets, battleships, tanks and infantry.  We constantly are on the look out for foreign enemies on our soil and the vigilance of our citizens has thwarted numerous terrorist attacks.  Unfortunately, Americans are not accustomed to recognize international weapons of economic mass destruction.  In the modern world, exports, deflation and economic competiveness are weapons far more powerful than cruise missiles.

Naive to this new deadly threat, the US government has launched wave after wave of assaults on the competiveness of American business.  Healthcare and financial service “reform” is driving business operating costs higher and credit availability down.  The soon-to-expire tax cuts will result in the largest tax increase in American history.  It should not be surprising that China would use tactics akin to economic guerrilla warfare to attack when our nation is most vulnerable.

China’s supply of young workers entering the labor force is peaking this year and will decline by one third over the next dozen years due to decades of population control.  But big increases in rural farm productivity are pushing huge numbers of the young off the farms and into the factories on the coast.  With factory worker suicides rampant and labor striking over wage rates too low to buy food, China panicked last year and increased its money supply by a spectacular 40% to quell dissent.  Given the threat from a sinking economy creating a revolutionary environment at home, communist China chose to invade world markets by exporting almost 40% of its gross domestic product.

Statistics just released have obliterated any hope that a meaningful economic expansion is under way in Europe, Japan or the US.  Business confidence, factory orders, auto sales and consumer product purchases are plummeting.  Meanwhile, Chinese exports grew a blistering 22% rate for the second quarter of 2010.  With their exports equaling 5% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP), China’s capture of another 1% of the world’s economy will force producers in other countries to cut employment by approximately 10 million jobs.

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The ink was barely dry on the $150 billion EU/IMF bailout of Greece when world stock markets tanked on two major fears. First, financial analysts are concerned that the bailout money won’t be enough to cover Greece’s borrowing needs from its out-of-control budget deficit. Second, there are fears that the EU/IMF deal will not be approved by the German parliament in a vote scheduled for Friday.

Additionally, there are new worries that the Greek debt contagion will spread to Spain and elsewhere in Europe. The looming specter of debt default and deflation is heavy in the air for investors worldwide.

Making market matters even riskier, German chancellor Angela Merkel faces key regional elections this Sunday in populous North Rhine-Westphalia, including the conservative areas of Cologne, Bonn, and Stuttgart. These cities hate government debt and overspending as much as the rest of Germany, if not more so.

The great postwar German leader Konrad Adenauer came from Cologne. He was a conservative Catholic who despised Nazism and Soviet communism. He also was an inflation fighter. To stop hyperinflation in the postwar period, Adenauer sponsored the new German mark and linked it to the dollar, which in those days was as good as gold.

Today, all of Germany still hates inflation.

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He’s also the new Republican governor of Virginia and is taking aim at the commonwealth’s oppressive and inefficient state-owned liquor monopoly. More than a dozen states still completely control the sales and distribution of all distilled spirits.

The result? Higher payrolls for state governments (state-workers are public-sector employees after all) and rotten selection and service for customers (state-sanctioned monopolies tend to diminish the shopping experience).

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